Amazon’s cloud infrastructure said to power 1% of the Internet

Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure has seen tremendous growth and is silently becoming a core element of the Internet. According to research from DeepField Networks, one-third of the millions of users covered by the study visited a website that uses Amazon’s infrastructure each day, WIRED reported on Wednesday. While most people still think of Amazon mainly as an Internet retailer, the company is quietly becoming “a massive utility” that is responsible for 1% of all Internet traffic in North America, according to Craig Labovitz, the co-founder of DeepField Networks. “My mother, for example, has heard of Facebook. She’s heard of Google. She buys stuff from Amazon. But I don’t think most people realize just how pervasive Amazon is becoming,” he said. “The number of websites that would now break if Amazon were to go down, and the growing pervasiveness of Amazon behind the scenes, is really quite impressive.” The company stored 762 billion objects in its S3 storage cloud last year, three times the number of objects stored 2010, and it operates several data centers on the West Coast, across Europe, and in Virginia, Singapore and Tokyo.